Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (7 page)

Polish patriotism spread outward from the intelligentsia, a large social group mostly composed of the children of noble landholders and of the rising middle classes, including the children of prosperous Jews. Polish political society was divided into two major orientations with opposing ideas about the design and purposes of the new polity. The most popular movement among Poles was known as National Democracy and led by Roman Dmowski. It favored land reform but only insofar as this helped Poles rather than Ukrainians and Belarusians, who were in some eastern regions of Poland more numerous and just as poor or poorer. The second major formation, descending from the Polish Socialist Party of Józef Piłsudski, supported land reform in principle, but in power yielded to the voices of the noble landholders it came to see as bastions of the state.

The differences between the two movements on the national and Jewish questions were fundamental. The National Democrats began from the idea that Polish traditions of toleration had doomed the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the eighteenth century, and that only ethnic Poles could be trusted. National Democrats tended to emphasize the need to create a nation from Polish-speaking peasants, to regard Ukrainians and other Slavs (perhaps a quarter of the population) as possibly assimilable, but to see Jews (about a tenth of the population) as foreigners. Although the movement was founded by secular nonbelievers influenced by a Social Darwinist conception of life as struggle, with time it assimilated traditional religious antisemitic ideas, such as the responsibility of Jews for the death of Jesus. Like the Roman Catholic Church, National Democrats tended to associate Jews with Bolshevism. The significant presence of Jews in Poland made antisemitism more politically salient there than in Germany, but it also made it more difficult for antisemites such as Dmowski to present Jews in an entirely uniform, stereotyped way. Although conspiratorial thinking and the Judeobolshevik conception were certainly present in religious and secular propaganda, Polish antisemites tended to think of Jews as a Polish rather than a planetary problem.

Dmowski’s opponent, Józef Piłsudski, began his conception of politics from the state rather than from the nation. He tended to value the traditions of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and to believe that its legacy of toleration was still applicable. He saw individuals as citizens of the state, with reciprocal obligations. He began as a socialist revolutionary, and even as he moved away from his youthful ideals he maintained the conviction that revolutionary violence was justified. Though his supporters were probably less numerous than Dmowski’s, he usually had the tactical advantage of the initiative. Whereas Dmowski tended to think that the Polish nation had to be raised from its peasant roots before statehood could be achieved, Piłsudski was ready to rally the forces that were available at any given time.

Piłsudski’s moment was the First World War. He had prepared for a European crisis by organizing Legions within the Habsburg monarchy. The idea was to fight alongside the regular Habsburg forces as long as that seemed to promise political gains for Poles within the multinational empire, and then use the military training for other purposes if and when it seemed warranted. While empires collapsed he also organized a secret Polish Military Organization tasked with winning independence and favorable borders. Piłsudski was able to take power in Warsaw and even lead a victorious war against Lenin’s revolutionary state in 1919–1920. What he could not do was persuade a majority of Poles to accept his version of the state. An old socialist comrade, Gabriel Narutowicz, was elected Poland’s first president and then was promptly assassinated by a nationalist fanatic. Piłsudski then withdrew from the politics of the state he had done much to create.

When Piłsudski returned to power, in 1926, it was by coup d’état against both the National Democratic Right and its dominance in Polish society, and against the threat of a communist Left which, he thought, the National Democrats only aided with their chauvinism. Rather than altering the constitution of the Polish republic, he manipulated its institutions, finding ways to generate pliable majorities in parliament. He formed an electoral entity, the Non-Party Bloc for Cooperation with the Government, which was supported by the national minorities, including traditional Jews. The orthodox Jewish party Agudat Yisrael became a bastion of support of his regime. Synagogues adopted resolutions to vote for Piłsudski’s Bloc, and rabbis led their followers to the urns. Some of the people who ran the Bloc were secular Jews and Ukrainians.

Piłsudski brought a fake democracy combined with a pinch of renewed liberalism. His maintenance of the appearance of democratic procedures after 1926 was meant to preserve a sense of legitimacy while keeping the National Democrats from winning power. His authoritarian regime perhaps held off the worst. The years between Piłsudski’s coup and his death saw world economic collapse, the rise of the Far Right across Europe, Hitler’s seizure of power and the beginning of the
Gleichschaltung
, and Joseph Stalin’s consolidation of power and the famines of Soviet collectivization. Piłsudski treated the state, in what was becoming an old-fashioned way, as the equal preserve of all citizens. His governments removed all legal discriminations against Jews, and created a legal basis for the local Jewish communes responsible for religious and cultural affairs.

Piłsudski’s fundamental respect for the state, as opposed to Hitler’s basic disdain for it, was visible in the fate of the organizations that Piłsudski had used to seize power. Just as Hitler had his SA and his SS, Piłsudski had his Legions and his Polish Military Organization. But the men and women who served in these Polish paramilitary formations were integrated into conventional state institutions, either after the war or when Piłsudski returned to power in 1926. Most of the men and women Piłsudski trusted in power had served in the Legions or the Polish Military Organization. They were sometimes involved in conspiracies of Piłsudski’s making, but formed no alternative structure based in aspirations to zoological anarchy or the supposed superiority of their race (some of them, in any event, were Jewish). Veterans of the organizations certainly indulged in the romantic myth of Piłsudski as the savior of the nation, and in the general cult of secular messianism that was the spiritual element of his sort of patriotism. The essential idea was that Poles suffered on this earth so that Poles and others might be liberated—also on this earth.

With time, these ideas became nostalgic rather than energizing, as the Polish independence won in 1918 came under increasing threat from both east and west. By 1933, when Hitler came to power, Piłsudski’s old comrades in arms—now diplomats, spies, and soldiers—were preoccupied with the state mainly as an achievement that had to be preserved from both Berlin and Moscow.

Józef Piłsudski was an enemy of the Soviet Union. He had beaten the Red Army on the battlefield in the Polish-Bolshevik War, and he regarded Stalin as a bandit. His feelings about the USSR, unlike Hitler’s, were shaped by personal knowledge of the Russian Empire. Hitler, who exhibited strong convictions about Russian history and racial character, did not know the Russian language and never visited the Russian Empire or the USSR. Piłsudski was born a Russian imperial subject, and had learned to curse in Russian during five years of political exile in Irkutsk—a habit he retained to the end of his life. Piłsudski had been across the Ural Mountains, which for Hitler were as mythical as the Hyperboreans; Piłsudski had been deported to Siberia, where Hitler dreamed of deporting Jews.

For Piłsudski neither Russia nor the Left was an abstraction. As a student in Kharkiv in 1886, he moved with the Russian revolutionary populists of Narodnaia Volia, the movement that would inspire the Bolsheviks of the next generation. A year later his older brother plotted with Lenin’s older brother in a conspiracy to assassinate the tsar. Piłsudski was accused of involvement as well, and sentenced to five years of Siberian exile. Upon his return he helped to establish the illegal Polish Socialist Party and edited its newspaper,
The Worker
. He was a Russian revolutionary, in that he and his comrades operated in an illegal underground along with Russians, Jews, and socialists of all possible origins in the Russian Empire.

Piłsudski was perfectly aware that there were Jews on the Left: Jews in the Russian socialist movement who opposed Polish independence; Jews who wanted Jewish autonomy with whom he cooperated; Jews in his own Polish Socialist Party. Jews were among the comrades and friends of his political youth and, in some measure, his political maturity. He knew the Polish Jews and other Poles who took part in the Bolshevik Revolution. These were, for him, individuals with names and pasts who had made a terrible mistake. He himself believed that statehood had to precede socialism. During and after the First World War he plotted with and fought alongside numerous Jewish members of his Legions and Polish Military Organization. In his circles the Judeobolshevik idea was known to be a folly. The Soviet Union was an actual foreign threat, whereas the Jewish question was a matter of domestic politics.

Piłsudski and his comrades tended to see empires as incubators of nations, and progress as national liberation. As people who had themselves built an independent nation-state from territories of the defunct Russian Empire, they tended to believe that the same process could be repeated within the Soviet Union. The major national question, to their minds, was Ukraine. Whereas Hitler and the Nazis tended to see Ukraine as a zone for settler colonization, Piłsudski and his comrades saw it as a neighboring country and a possible political asset. Indeed, for many Polish leaders Ukraine was home. Piłsudski was from Lithuania, but he studied in eastern Ukraine. Many of Piłsudski’s lieutenants were Poles from Ukraine, and much of the 1919–1920 war with the Bolsheviks had been fought there. Thousands of Poles from Ukraine had been killed in battle there, as had thousands of Poles who were not. Poles from Ukraine regarded the country sometimes sentimentally and often condescendingly, but always as a place inhabited by human beings. Unlike the Nazis, no Polish statesman could see Ukraine as a blank slate or as a land without people.

After Piłsudski’s return to power in 1926, some of his old comrades in the foreign ministry and in military intelligence began a project known as Prometheanism. Named after the titan of Greek mythology who blessed humanity with light and cursed humanity with hope, this policy involved the support of oppressed nations against empires, and in particular the support of the Ukrainian cause in the Soviet Union. The USSR had been established as a union of formally national republics. Soviet leaders imagined that new non-Russian and non-Jewish elites could be recruited through an acknowledgment of the existence of the other nationalities combined with affirmative action. Their optimism was grounded in a Marxist faith about the future triumph of the working class and the socialism it would bring. The Polish Prometheans, working from a different scheme of history, saw the Soviet nations rather than social classes as the historical actors that, with proper support, might weaken the Soviet Union. Prometheanism was the hidden part of Polish foreign policy, funded from secret budgets and carried out by trusted men and women. Its centerpiece was Poland’s most Ukrainian province, Volhynia, where for several years a Ukrainian culture was officially supported in order to attract the attention and sympathy of Ukrainians within the Soviet Union.

Naturally, support of national movements within the Soviet Union, and the whole Promethean idea, were thought to serve Polish interests. Even so, many of those who took part in them also believed that they were continuing a certain ethical tradition, one of sacrifices made by one nation for the good of all. Their liberal nationalism had been confirmed rather than challenged by the outcome of the First World War. The slogan from the romantic patriots of the nineteenth century was “For your freedom and ours!” All would make sacrifices, and all could triumph in the end.

Piłsudski was right to see the USSR as a solid political edifice and as a continual threat to Poland, but wrong to view it as a kind of updated Russian Empire. Hitler grasped its novelty and radicalism, but mistakenly reduced the ideas and aims of its leaders to Jewish world domination. Soviet ideologists presented Piłsudski and Hitler together as “fascists,” which overlooked the very significant differences between an authoritarian defender of statehood and a warmongering biological anarchist. But Marxists were right to notice that the private property regime that prevailed in both Poland and Germany was so different from the Soviet system as to make communism almost impossible to understand in both Warsaw and Berlin.